Cilento, Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia

Three east-west mountain ridges form the backbone of the spectacular landscapes of Cilento. The stunning landscapes and the cultural history combine to justify Cilento’s status a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park protects much of this sublime landscape – it is Italy’s second largest national park. The mountains are impressive. Monte Bulgheria reaches over 4000 feet above sea level before dropping precipitously to the deep blue Tyrrhenian Coast. White cliffs hug beautiful crescents of sand, unreachable by anything but boat.

Virgil’s Aeneid recounts how Palinurus, the helmsman of the Trojan Aeneas’s ship, was singled out for sacrifice off this coast to ensure the safe passage of all on board; he was drugged by the god of sleep and thrown overboard and the beach of Cilento took his body. Today, one of the Europe’s most unusual and beautiful Primulas honours Palinurus’s name. Decorating the coastal cliffs above those same beaches Primula palinuri is perhaps one of Europe’s most unusual wild flowers. Large umbels of bright yellow flowers top a rosette of large lime green leaves in cracks in the cliff, an arresting and beautiful sight. It has an extremely restricted distribution in coastal areas of the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea. A fantastically architectural mini-forest of Euphorbia dendroides cloaks the slopes and drapes from the cliffs. We’ll take a boat trip along this most scenic of coasts to a secret place where we’ll see the very best displays of the Primula along with the rare Fritillaria messanensis subspecies gracilis, a recently described form which is known from only three localities. Tufts of white Iberis semperflorens are a fine sight amongst the strawberry trees.

Olive groves close by our quiet rural hotel will already be alive with colourful Anemones, ivory Bellevalia romana and abundant Cerinthe major. A rich variety of spring flowers include Allium roseum, the last blooms of the unusual Widow Iris, and orchids. Particularly prevalent in the area is Dactylorhiza romana, but there are many bee orchids too including Bumble-Bee Orchid, Early Spider Orchid and the lovely Ophrys exaltata.

Golden Eagles soar above quiet lanes in the higher mountains that offer wonderful views down to the brilliant blue Tyrrhenian Sea. Here amongst lovely open woodlands we can find plentiful Helleborus foetidus as well as Anemone hortensis and Romulea bulbocodium. Rock Partridges scurry for cover as we walk. Stands of Viburnum tinus are smothered in white blooms, making for a perfect picture with the green and grey mountain slopes and the cobalt sea below.

Calabria is arguably the most remote and least developed region of Italy cut off from the rest of the peninsula by the Pollino Massif which rises to over 2000 metres above sea level on one side and by the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Sea on the other. This makes this rugged and wild peninsula more isolated even than Sicily itself! Calabria was also the part of Italy longer and more closely connected to the Byzantine Empire, and in the Aspromonte National Park people in the mountain villages still speak a Greek dialect.

Calabria is still pretty unknown to orchid enthusiasts from abroad, however there’s a small but very active local community of experts, and we’ll visit some of their ‘secret’ sites in the area, led there by Luigi Torino, a physicist by occupation who is now arguably the most knowledgeable orchid specialist of Calabria. The South of Calabria has much in common wildlife and orchids-wise with Sicily, and we’ll see over 20 taxa (species and hybrids) of orchids, plus a wide variety of other Mediterranean flowers and wildlife of early Spring.

For the second week of the tour we’ll catch a fery across the Straits of Messina to the island of Sicily. Ninety kilometres south of still active Mount Etna we find Monte Ible’s dry limestone slopes which in spring are adorned with a wonderful show of flowers.

Anemones, Irises and Asphodels are abundant in the abandoned fields and terraces above Syracusa but it will be the orchids that will steal the show. A dozen or more species can be seen in some of these tiny fields. Spectacular Pink Butterfly Orchids are joined by Orchis longicornu whose deep purple, white and pink flowers make it one of Europe’s prettiest orchids. Amid Giant and Naked Man Orchids we’ll enjoy a prolific show of bee orchids with abundant yellow and pink Sawfly Orchid, colourful Ophrys bertolonii and fur-rimmed Mirror Orchid. Sicily is a hotspot in the evolution of this group of orchids. Yellow-edged Ophrys biancae and both Ophrys lunulata and Ophrys panormitana are found nowhere else in the world and several others can only be seen here or on the nearby mainland.

We’ll explore limestone gorges, wooded valleys and even coastal nature reserves where a fascinating saltmarsh and dune flora will keep us busy when we’re not looking at the Flamingos, Black-winged Stilts and Slender-billed Gulls!

For the third week of the trip we move to Sardinia and the ‘lost world’ of the Giara di Gesturi is a landscape as unexpected as it is strangely beautiful. Outcrops of pinky-black basalt and prehistoric ‘nuraghi’ emerge from marshy meadows and dwarf Cork Oak woodlands on plateaux two thousand feet above sea level.

As a chorus of trills from Tyrrhenean Tree Frogs rises from pools we’ll enjoy lovely Crocus minimus and pink-purple Romulea revelieri amongst several orchids. Newly described Ophrys ortuabis blooms with yellow Anemones under the shadow of six-thousand feet high Monti del Gennargentu. We’ll visit a wood full of the endemic Paeonia morisii, a startling sight. Lower down the beguiling landscapes that lie between our ideally placed hotel and the Fluminese are rich in orchids. One of Europe’s most beautiful orchids, Orchis longicornu is rather common, and mixes with Pink Butterfly Orchid and the endemic Orchis ichnusae. The lovely Mirror Orchid is a frequent sight and amongst a host of commoner Bee Orchids we’ll see plenty of the island’s specialities of which there are quite a number! Ophrys eleonorae has lips of glowing blue and purple, endemic Ophrys chestermannii large velvety square flowers, and oval-lipped flowers of grey, purple and pink belong to exquisite Ophrys morisii.

The little green orchid Gennaria diphylla joins several species of Romulea, Bellardia and Barbary Nuts in one of Europe’s pre-eminent wetlands, the little-known Sinis. Corsican Swallowtails fly amongst dunes by lagoons that are home to birds such as Audouin’s Gulls. Even as we land at Cagliari’s airport we’ll see flocks of Greater Flamingos on lagoons next to the runway – Sardinia’s that sort of place!